It’s the birthday of nonfiction author Anne Fadiman (b. 1953), best known for her 1997 work of literary journalism, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which tells the story of an epileptic Hmong girl and her family’s ordeal with the American medical system. The book won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for General Nonfiction and is still widely read, including by medical doctors interested in increasing their cultural sensitivity.

Fadiman was born in New York City to Clifton Fadiman, the famous writer, editor, and critic, and Annalee Jacoby Fadiman, a war correspondent in China during WWII—so not surprisingly, Anne and her brothers were raised in an unusually literary atmosphere involving lots of book discussions and word play. Fun fact: Clifton Fadiman wrote, among many other things, a book called The Lifetime Reading Plan that provides guidance in educating oneself in classical literature. The book was published in 1960 but has been updated over the years and is still selling and being reviewed on Amazon.

Fadiman went to Harvard where she roomed with Wendy Lesser, who became the founding editor of The Threepenny Review, an excellent quarterly lit journal. Fadiman graduated in 1975. She is renowned for her teaching and editing as well as her writing; she edited The American Scholar for seven years and has a prestigious writer-in-residence position at Yale University. Fadiman’s husband, author George Howe Colt, once said, “You have such a naturally didactic personality, you might as well get paid for it!” She and her husband trade off writing and holding jobs that offer health insurance. They have two children.

The important thing here is to run out and buy a copy of Fadiman’s collection of essays, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (1998), which is endlessly entertaining and will help you determine whether you are a courtly or a carnal lover of books. (I dog ear my books and read in the bathtub. Guess which kind I am?) Her next collection of essays is At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays (2007), which I haven’t read but now want to read immediately: it covers topics ranging from her crush on Charles Lamb to her passion for ice cream made from liquid nitrogen. Fadiman’s most recent book is The Wine Lover’s Daughter: A Memoir (2017), in which she explores her relationship with her father and his relationship with wine. Spoiler alert: this is not one of those memoirs where someone is revealed to have been a horrible parent. Fadiman writes, ““If my father were forgotten, the balance of my world would shift so disorientingly that I’d lose my footing. I still check periodically to make sure he has more Google entries than I do. Phew.”

Have a pleasant Thursday, sun or no sun, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.